The field of the disclosure is the manufacture of contact lenses for administering beneficial agents.
Methods of making contact lenses for administering ophthalmic drugs and other beneficial agents to the ocular tissue of a patient have been described. Some problems associated with prior art methods include inefficient use of the beneficial agent in that significantly more drug is required to make the lens than is actually delivered by the lens to the patient. Another problem is that the dimensions or physical properties of the lens may significantly change upon release of the agent from the drug. Yet another problem of prior art methods for manufacturing such lenses is that the methods are complex and not amenable to high volume manufacturing operations. We have discovered improved methods of manufacturing beneficial agent-releasing contact lenses that overcome the foregoing problems.
Contact lens packages including a sealed receptacle that contains a contact lens made of a silicone hydrogel copolymer in a sterile solution which comprises a stabilizing agent which can form an ionic complex or hydrogen bond with the hydrogel copolymer, have been described in U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2007/0149428. A packaging system and method for the storage of an ionic hydrogel lens that uses an aqueous packing solution which includes a phosphorylcholine polymer, and which further can include a buffering agent, have been described in U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2009/0100801. Other background publications include U.S. Pat. No. 7,811,601, U.S. Publ. No. 2008/0085922, U.S. Publ. No. 2010/0249356, U.S. Publ. No. 2008/0124376, U.S. Publ. No. 2008/0023345, U.S. Publ. No. 2009/0324691, U.S. Publ. No. 2007/0265247, Karlgard et al, Int J Pharm (2003) 257:141-51, and Soluri et al., Optom Vis Sci (2012) 89:1140-1149.